Meebo Packs Up Your Favorite Websites And Takes Check-Ins Mobile

Last November, Meebo took a step into a new territory for them: check-ins. But instead of checking into physical locations in the real world, they decided they were going to allow users to check-in to the sites on the web they were browsing. It’s a concept that a few other startups are trying as well, but Meebo has one big advantage: scale.

But as big as Meebo’s reach is, they recognize that people aren’t always going to be sitting at their desks checking in to website. So they’re taking the experience mobile.

The lastest version of Meebo’s iPhone chat client, launching today, gives users the check-in experience on the go. This way, when you’re browsing your favorite websites from your iPhone, you’ll be able to quickly check-in and share them just as you would from Meebo’s MiniBar.

Of course, this isn’t quite as seemless as on the desktop. Because Apple’s doesn’t allow for system-wide extensions, the Meebo check-in system on the iPhone requires that you’re browsing sites through their app to be able to check-in. But Meebo has built a nice “Updates” area of the app that allows you to view social streams from the likes of Twitter and Facebook, so you can easily find things to browse.

“The mobile app launch is bringing our nascent web checkin system to mobile. This is Meebo’s solution to solve something that we think is lacking in the web today: the ability to harness the discoveries of people with interests like our own while simply browsing the web,” Meebo founder Seth Sternberg says.

“Nielsen data says that people spend about 1/3 of their time on communication hubs and 2/3 of their time in the rest of the web — much of which is exploring points of interest. This interest-driven behavior represents a huge part of people’s everyday browsing and we think it is where the focus of the social web is headed next,” he continues.

Meebo also just rolled out the MiniBar to Microsoft’s IE web browser, still the most widely-used browser in the world.

The larger Meebo Bar is now on some 8,000 sites around the web. And as you can see in the Quantcast chart below, it’s helping Meebo grow very, very quickly.